Oracle performance tuning with Real World Performance Group

I was a part of a unique Oracle training seminar that happened in Munich, Germany last week.
This is a Day of Real World Performance Tour seminar given by: Andrew Holdsworth, Tom Kyte, Graham Wood. These 3 well known Oracle experts are key members of the Real World Performance Team that consist of about 25 database experts who focus on Oracle database performance tuning, creating live demos and teaching customers how Oracle perform and how they should write the optimal code.

The format of this Oracle event is very unique. The entire seminar day Andrew, Tom and Graham are continuously on stage sharing in the conversational format very unique technical material debating (sometimes in a funny form) with each other and the audience. There are three screens in the seminar room and every instructor drives his own projector. They show the quite interesting live demos loading terabytes of data and manipulating with billions of rows in just several minutes on their own Exadata systems.

Interesting enough that these guys consider performance tuning aspects of the same problem from different angels sometimes contradicting each other but finally giving concrete solutions and best practices to follow. After those tests and lessons learned you definitely change your mind in terms of database and application performance tuning.

This training seminar makes interesting not only the unique technical material but also all three very different personalities of the instructors and their backgrounds. Tom has never been a DBA but he represents mainly the software development part educating customers on how Oracle works and performing benchmarks. Andrew represents System Architecture putting together the working framework and representing hardware and system aspects. Graham is good in System performance tuning and monitoring and represents DBA aspects. He is known as a father of Oracle Statspack, AWR and ASH :). Together the three of them represent more than 60 years of real world Oracle implementations focusing in the area of performance tuning. Tom by the way is the youngest from all of them in this aspect 🙂

It was great opportunity to attend this training seminar, learn Oracle database performance tuning aspects and meet personally best Oracle experts, talk to them in nice atmosphere of Kempinski Hotel Airport Munich.